CNPHI Focus Areas

To reach its objectives, CNPHI has organized its activities into six main areas of focus:

• Disease Specific Pan Canadian Alerting and Notification
  • Alerting component includes applications for the timely sharing and strategic dissemination of intelligence between various levels of stakeholders.
• Disease Specific & Syndromic Surveillance and Reporting
  • Surveillance component provides applications that facilitate program specific needs for data collection, analysis, reporting and interrogation.
    
• Communication & Collaboration
  
  • Collaboration Centres assist user groups with the structured and organized management of activities and agreed to information sharing.
• Knowledge Management
  • Knowledge Management component consolidates various web-based resources including public and protected resources into a common place.
    
• Event & Operations Management
  
  • Event Management component includes an electronic incident command structure management system as well as an alternate notification system.
• Laboratory Quality Systems
  
  • Laboratory Quality Systems component intends to provide tools for online reporting and analysis of data including management of distributed testing.

Supported by three modules:

• Data Analysis
• Data Integration
• Registration System

These areas of focus have a two-fold purpose:

• To direct CNPHI toward achieving its goals by focusing activities in the areas that will achieve greatest impact.
• To organize initiatives and activities into practical categories for implementation and ease of communication.

Pan Canadian Alerting & Notifications

CNPHI provides two main alerting systems: Public Health Alerts and Drinking Water Advisories.

The Public Health Alerts system is a national, secure, web-based environment that allows for the timely sharing and strategic dissemination of public health intelligence between local/regional, provincial/territorial and national public health stakeholders. The goal is to enhance stakeholder capacity to anticipate, detect, respond, prevent and control health risks associated with communicable disease events. It is the only public health technology network that links all provinces/territories, regional/local health authorities and the national agencies. The system currently supports five modules: Respiratory, Enteric, Zoonotic, General and Adverse Events Following Immunization (AEFI).

The national Drinking Water Advisories system is a secure, web-based application to facilitate the posting, notification, management and analysis of drinking water advisories within or across local, regional, provincial/territorial or federal jurisdictions. The application also captures cumulative, high quality data on drinking water advisories over time and yields detailed analyses to help identify key themes and priorities while supporting internal reporting needs. This highly adaptable tool is available for use by agencies across Canada.

Disease Specific & Syndromic Surveillance and Reporting

The CNPHI platform focuses on two main types of surveillance applications: routine and real-time.

Routine surveillance enables automated/manual collection of disparate data (schools absenteeism, sentinel sites physician data, laboratory data, emergency room data and public health unit data) and run it through program specific algorithms providing jurisdictional and role specific information to the stakeholders. This module is reproducible and configurable so that other program specific modules can be developed using the same architecture. Examples include National Enteric Surveillance Program (NESP) and Outbreak Summary Reporting. The goal of the Outbreak Summary Reporting Application is to give local and provincial public health authorities and federal public health officials the ability to summarize results of outbreak investigations. It allows local and provincial/territorial public health professionals to collect, query, summarize and generate reports on the results of outbreak investigations. The application provides a secure, web-based communication system for summarizing enteric, respiratory and vaccine preventable disease outbreak information in a systematic and standardized manner.

Real-Time surveillance facilitates use of various sources of data that could identify or verify community-wide increases in different disease syndromes as a means to monitor community health. Various types of data include nurse telehealth calls (teletriage) and emergency room visits. The system supports different types of standardized symptom or disease codes that subsequently can be categorized in to syndromes (ex: SNOMED).

Communication & Collaboration

The CNPHI platform includes secure web-based Collaboration Centres to assist public health stakeholders with the structured and organized management of activities and agreed to information sharing among multi-jurisdictional agencies. These Centres represent a collective of communication, coordination and information management applications to assist public health professions with everything from daily group activities to emergent public health event response. The collaboration centre technology provides multiple resource including Documents Manager; Discussion Board; News Board; Meetings Manager; Group Notification and Web Data along with an interactive configuration console for administrators.

These centres are customizable and allow program areas to personalize the banners and color schemes as well as setup the structure and control access based on workgroup membership.

Knowledge Management

CNPHI ’s knowledge management component consolidates various web-based resources including public and protected resources into a common place. The access for protected resources is controlled automatically based on a user’s profile to avoid multiple logins via various single sign-on methodologies.

Knowledge management is intended to provide seamless access to expensive resources such as GIDEON and Online Journals to CNPHI users.

A unique tool called News Console has been developed that links to various health news feeds including ProMed, Eurosurveillance and World Health News using RSS feeds.

Event Management

The CNPHI platform provides event management applications that support emergency event management including an electronic incident command structure management system. The applications are intended to provide the following benefits:

• Integrated organizational structure.
• Integrated communication and planning.
• Method for dividing and sub-dividing functions and management.

The Event management component leverages some of the existing modules together to assist in response management. For instance, public health professionals can quickly set up collaboration centres to communicate and exchange information electronically. They can leverage public health alerts/notification system to setup approval based jurisdiction specific notification systems to communicate sensitive information to various parties.

Laboratory Quality Systems

The CNPHI platform intends to provide tools for online reporting and analysis of laboratory based data. Applications included in this focus area facilitate:

• Online data entry and management associated with proficiency panels;
• Tracking of packages shipped into a specific laboratory whereby the receiving lab receives a notification of incoming shipments in advance;
• A national structure for quality management in medical laboratories for provinces and territories to pursue issues of common concern and interest;
• Development and promotion of national standards where appropriate; and
• Communication and collaboration among the member organizations.